Critical Essay by Eva J. Engel

With every new beginning, Hesse believed himself to be dealing with new problems and new figures. But on looking back in 1953 he realized that he had been concentrating all the time, from differing levels of experience, on "the few problems and types that are appropriate" to him. The demarcation of the poetic potential of his themes—though this seemed meagre to him then—is irrelevant, for at a later stage it enabled Hesse to look back on groups of individuals and to discern in them resemblances of character. He sees in them a multiform entity …, and thus he is confirmed in the belief not only that each individual needs to "awake" and be "reborn" but that this is the way in which the evolution of man will come about.